How Doctors Can be More Like Jedi Knights

By Mary Kate Nelson | April 25, 2017

In the future, a visit to a doctor’s office may resemble a trip to a galaxy far, far away. Your primary care physician may even be a Jedi Knight.

At least, that’s what a future trip to the doctor could feel like, according to Jeffrey Hill, senior principal at Minnesota-based management and technology consulting firm Trexin Consulting. Hill and his colleague Jimmy Lee, managing principal at Trexin, believe that future health care patients could very well feel as though they jumped straight into a Star Wars film.

The “Jedi-fication of the primary care physician” involves enabling a doctor to “know all, see all and know what to do before it happens,” Hill explained during a presentation at the Midwest Healthcare Real Estate 2017 event in Chicago on April 25.

This can all be accomplished by having patients use wearables and devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), so their health data can be transferred seamlessly into electronic medical records (EMRs). But these EMRs will used differently than those used by doctors today, Hill said.

Eventually, doctors won’t have to take notes on a computer in front of their patients. Instead, “there’s going to be big, flat screen TV[s] that the patient and doctor want to look at” in examination rooms that display all of the patient’s relevant information during his or her office visit.

“There’s going to be people upstairs, or even through electronic devices, listening, transcribing and taking those notes so the doctor doesn’t have to sit there and pound on the keyboard,” Hill added.

Additionally, future doctors’ offices could include a small recording studio that doctors use to host “virtual visits, not only with the patients, but with the families, to reinforce [and] manage care.”

All together, this will amount to “more technology, more touch, more efficiency [and] better satisfaction,” Hill concluded.